Mariana Manriquez

Photo by Jazmin Beltran.

I am a sociologist of work, algorithms, digital technologies, and culture. I am currently a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Arizona with an expected date of graduation of May 2025.

Using ethnographic and interview methods, I seek to understand how the increasingly ubiquitous presence of digital technologies re-shapes labor. I examine how social, cultural, geographical, and economic contexts shape and are shaped by digital technologies, resulting in a unique transformation of work practices and worker’s identities at a local level. Currently, my primary research site is Mexico.

My dissertation, entitled “Delivered: Working and Living with Algorithms in Mexico City,” includes a qualitative investigation of food delivery gig work in Mexico’s capital. Using ethnographic and interview methods, I examine how the cultural, social, economic, and geographical contexts in which couriers are embedded not only inform how couriers navigate, interpret, and resist the multiple digital technologies embedded in food delivery platforms, but also shapes these technologies themselves. In this vein, my dissertation interrogates two mtyhs at the epicenter of technocentric narrtives of work. The myth of automation—the belief that technologies are going to replace human labor—and the myth of universality—the belief that uniform technological templates travel across the globe.

My scholarship is rooted in my early experiences growing up in Mexico and in the Borderlands of Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora. As a bicultural subject, I have an acute sensibility for noting how transformations of work amid technological reconfigurations, although occurring at a global level, are experienced differently in the everyday of each locale. Overall, I am enthusiastic about using qualitative methodologies and interdisciplinary theorizations to interrogate and reformulate conceptualizations at the intersection of work and technology in light of Global South realities.